Is it an accident
that many who are fighting slavery around the world are Christians,
including activists working in such countries as the Sudan where buying
back slaves has become a contentious issue?

Calvin history
professor James Bratt (left) says it's not just happenstance that brings
Christians to the forefront in the fight against slavery.

Indeed for U.S.
Christians ending slavery traces its roots to the American abolitionist
movement which was fueled by evangelicals and Quakers. Although the
two groups, says Bratt, "did not regard each other as very close
company," some of them could agree on this one hot issue.

Bratt's area of
expertise is American religion prior to the Civil War and that ties
his work closely to the era of U.S. slavery and abolitionism. Indeed,
he says that "without evangelical Protestants there would have
been no abolition movement." He is quick to add, however, that
religion also provided some of the strongest arguments to justify slavery.

Those opposing
perspectives, and the ultimate success of the abolition movement, were
just some of the reasons Bratt, also director of the Calvin
Center for Christian Scholarship, was excited to have been chosen
recently to take part in a week-long seminar on slavery, sponsored by
the Council of Independent Colleges and the Gilder Lehrman Institute
of American History, held at Columbia University in New York.

The seminar was
led by David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at
Yale and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance and Abolition. Davis, who has just published "In the
Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery,"
had been a professor of Bratt's when Bratt was a graduate student at
Yale in the 1970s.

Says Bratt simply:
"He's still brilliant."

Also brilliant
was the company Bratt kept for the week. His 31 colleagues (who had
been selected from a pool of 125 nominees) represented a wide variety
of colleges and universities across the U.S., but all had significant
expertise in the history of slavery and abolitionism. Bratt says the
experience of being a student for a week, learning from both the seminar
leaders (Davis, Harvard professor Orlando Patterson and University of
Houston historian Steven Mintz) and fellow students was exhilarating.

"It was great
to be a student again," he says. "Between the morning lectures,
afternoon discussions and things at night like movies about slavery
we didn't have much free time. But the atmosphere was so terrific the
days flew by."

One of the things
the seminar did was help participants think about teaching slavery.

"This,"
says Bratt, "is a tough topic. There's some pretty horrific themes.
And so in the afternoons we talked about pedagogy - how do you teach
this stuff."

In addition to
the discussions about teaching, seminar participants also were given
a CD-Rom filled with teaching tools and educational resources to assist
them. Bratt says that both the CD and the discussions will enhance his
undergraduate teaching at Calvin and his own scholarly research and
writing.

He plans already
to incorporate slavery studies into the introductory history core course
on the west and the world, noting that "slavery was a major way
that the west interacted with the world; in fact, it dominated America's
international trade." At one point, he says, slave labor accounted
for 80 percent of all American exports and "helped fuel the American
industrial and commercial revolution."

He's also thinking
about making slavery part of a January DCM (Discovering the Christian
Mind) course, exploring the Christian arguments for and against slavery
and looking at how Christians were foremost in making both arguments.
He notes that Christianity, Islam and Judaism all arose in the context
of slavery and while none insisted that slavery was wrong they all did
try to ameliorate it. Then, during a time of religious revival in the
U.S. (the first Great Awakening in the mid 1700s) slavery was deemed
to be a sin, something that, Bratt says, "in and of itself was
very unusual."

And he wants to
make slavery part of a senior research seminar, centered on the paradox
of a nation where the notion of liberty and the reality of slavery grew
together at the same time. "There's interesting relationships,"
he says, "between religion, capitalism and slavery. The Quakers
were powers in international trade and evangelicals were strong in the
emerging commercial economies of New England and upstate New York. And
that's where the abolitionist movement first grew and gathered momentum.
So what was the relationship between all of these beliefs? Those are
questions to explore (in a senior seminar)."

Says Bratt: "I
see teaching ramifications from this seminar at all levels of our history
department offerings."

Bratt plans to
wrap up a biography of reformer Abraham Kuyper this coming school year
and then turn his attention to writing and research on the intersections
of religion, American history, slavery and abolitionism.